Benedict Vitai

“When you do a departure along the northerly from Gatwick, you get a real sense of humanity. As you climb out over the city, you can see masses of people down there, all the buildings and all the built-up area are lit up. And at night-time you’ve got the M25, which circles London, and you can see all these little beady lights that are dotted around in a very windy circle and you realize that it’s six o’clock around the M25. Day by day they’re down there and you just think of the effort, all the effort, just to get by. It’s a tough city. All those little dots, those beads of light, like a rosary, all those people, wanting to get in, wanting to get out.”
― Craig Taylor, Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It

“People in this land,’ he wrote in 1941, ‘seem not even yet to realise that in the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. I have in this War a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler for ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”
― Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

“Hope is optimism with a broken heart.”
― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage

“My wife always says she’d love to live in the countryside. I like the idea of escaping all the nonsense of London, but you know what? My heart and soul are here in the city, really. So I think that’s where I’ll always be.”
― Craig Taylor, Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It